


Pacific

by 2ndA



Series: GK/WWII AU [4]
Category: Generation Kill
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Historical, M/M, WWII, no(t much) angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-07
Updated: 2017-10-07
Packaged: 2019-01-10 06:10:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,365
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12292950
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/2ndA/pseuds/2ndA
Summary: Maybe it was the Endeavour fic I just finished writing, maybe it was watching too much news this week, but I've just had a weird need to write some 1950s AU where everyone ends up okay.  This is a coda to finish off my WWII 'verse fic from ages ago (which is summarized in the end notes if you don't want to read the whole thing).





	Pacific

_"There is just one life for each of us: our own."_

 

Brad and Nate stay at Mathilda Farm for three more years.  Nate is occasionally called in to do obscure things for the Foreign Office…but there is a change in government and the summons arrive less and less frequently.  Brad takes his honorable discharge and resolves to stay far away from the US military and its Allies for the rest of his days.  He is not a superstitious man, but he suspects he’s had more than his fair share of luck, knows there’s not enough of that shit to go around.  He maintains that leaving England just because the plumbing is bad and the food is still rationed insults his warrior spirit.   Really, he stays because he thinks Nate wants to be there. 

However, after Lou leaves school and goes to share a bedsit with some schoolmates in London, the big old mansion at Mathilda becomes a bit of a haunted house for Nate.  They will argue half-heartedly and forever about whose idea it was to relocate to the States, but they both agree that it was Brad who went first.   And they both blame Ray: it was his letters that first gave Brad the idea of applying to the aircraft school in west Texas.

After Brad leaves, it takes Nate nearly ten weeks to close out his affairs and sail to New York.  He hasn’t been a tourist in so long, he’s almost forgotten how to do it.  He calculates that the last time he was this far from home for the sheer pleasure of it was probably the time he and Richard ran away from their tutoring group and ended up in Berlin.  There’s no need to rush, though, and so Nate doesn’t.  He spends hours in Central Park, days at the Metropolitan Museum.  One afternoon, he takes himself to Coney Island; on the subway train, he stands between two people with numbers tattooed on their wrists, visible when they turn the pages of a newspaper, when they check the  time on their wristwatches.  He takes a few trips up and down the Eastern Seaboard—he likes Baltimore, dislikes Boston, wonders if he could ever persuade Brad to move to Washington, DC.  Then a train to New Orleans, a rental car to Texas.  His pace is leisurely because, as he tells Brad, Americans will insist on driving on the wrong side of the road.  From Sussex to Texas, by way of New York, New Orleans and, in its way, Berlin.  Four months.  It is the longest he and Brad spend apart for the rest of their lives. 

America is brash and prosperous.  Everyone has a war story and no one wants to talk about it, which suits Brad and Nate just fine.   Brad’s military record and some fast-talking on Ray’s part get him a job flying experimental jets.  Nate is frankly pursued by the president of the local land-grant college, as much for his accent as for his Oxbridge degree.  He agrees to teach a semester of Latin, mostly so the president’s wife will stop dropping by with fruitcake and partially to fund his expensive habit of having books shipped from the east coast.  Then Dr. McKent runs off with one of his co-eds (the former Llano, Texas Strawberry Queen).  Because this is the wild west where there’s GI Bill money to burn and university educations are scarce, Nate becomes the first person in the great state of Texas to hold joint university appointments in Classics and Political Science.

Brad rents a tiny old farmhouse just far enough from the base to justify purchasing a motorcycle, and with just enough land to keep neighbors from stopping by unannounced.  Most people never even know that he shares it with that English fellow from up at the college. On either coast, Brad and Nate’s living arrangements would have generated knowing smirks, but they happen to have landed at the intersection of the Bible Belt and the US military.  Though rural Texas made sacrifices during the war, in some ways it has retained a prelapsarian innocence.   The few people who do notice figure that Nate must be saving himself from the sort of temptations that ruined Dr. McKent.  And Brad?  Well, that nice young man is just doing his Christian duty, sheltering a stranger in a strange land.

Not long after Eisenhower begins his second term, Brad comes home and tells Nate he’s been recommended for a position in California, at a facility that is studying rocket and jet propulsion.  On one hand, his plane might literally explode at any moment.  On the other, any day he isn’t blown to smithereens, he can go surfing.  Say the word and I’ll turn them down, Brad offers. Nate considers how Brad once dropped everything and hitch-hiked across war-torn Germany to sit by his bedside.  He recalls the many times Brad watched him pack his suitcase at Mathilda without ever objecting.  He thinks about how short life can be, and how unpredictable. “Well,” he says, “I’ve never seen the Pacific Ocean.”

Ray marries the plainest girl in his hometown, a spitfire of a spinster named Virginia who becomes a minor light in the area of southwestern anthropology.  Brad declares it a match for the ages, if only because no one else would have either of them.  Every time there’s a chink in the Iron Curtain—a breath of detante, a rumor of new information—Ray seeks out news about Walt.  Nate is often dragooned into proofreading the letters, addressed to various members of the Soviet Politburo, the International Red Cross, the Polish Worker’s Party.  “Do you think I’m just encouraging him?”  Nate asks, once.  “Probably,” Brad shrugs.  “But a little courage never hurt anybody.” 

In California, Nate continues teaching.  He writes several monographs, one of which become a seminal work in his field. He supports the war in Korea. He worries about the French in Indochina.  When Em’s son Robert turns fourteen, Nate invites him to spend the summer.  Em protests that it is far too expensive, nonsense to spend so much on a child’s holiday, but Nate says that making global citizens of the next generation is an excellent use of money.  Besides, he says, since Em and Davy have moved into Mathilda, a visit from their children is almost as good as going home. 

“You could always just…go home,” Brad suggests gently.  “Just for a visit.”

“I could,” Nate agrees, but he doesn’t. 

That first trip is such a success that Brad proposes they extend the same offer to little Katherine three years later.  Soon it’s a tradition: one or the other of the Em’s children come every other year for the summer holidays.  Twice, they are accompanied by their aunt Lou, but Louisa finds it increasingly difficult to get away. After boarding school, she’d taken a job in the typing pool of a small but well-regarded literary magazine in London and within a few years, she’s become indispensible as their first female editor.  She and Nate rendezvous occasionally in New York when she travels for business.  He always returns from those trips with a new, hand-knitted jumper for Brad, each more skillful than the last, and always far too warm for Southern California.

Brad has become what fifty years later will be knows as an “early adopter” of technology, so of course, he is the first on their block to acquire a television set.  Nate despises it, says it is nothing at all like the theater, but even he sits spell-bound to watch every grainy moment of footage related to the moon launch.  They call Kitty in from her sunbathing in the garden (she is their only guest that summer, since Robert stayed at Oxford for the long vac).  A fuzzy marshmallow man jumps around on the moon—the moon!  When the camera cuts to their man at Cape Canaveral for station identification, Brad considers that perhaps the century hasn’t been a complete waste after all.

And so, like the heroes of the bedtime stories Nate once told Lou in the nursery at Mathilda, they live to the end of their days, mostly happy.

**Author's Note:**

> In this AU, Brad flies planes for the US Army Air Force during WWII. Briefly invalided to an English country hospital, he and his RAF sidekick Ray spend Christmas 1942 at Nate's family farmhouse. Hijinks ensue in "Owed By So Many to So Few": Brad befriends Nate's sisters, Ray falls for Polish-partisan Walt, Brad falls into bed with Nate, everyone wonders why Nate is shirking on the homefront. Things are misinterpreted, feelings get hurt, all is eventually resolved and we learn that Nate has been working for the SOE the whole time. In the second story, "The Shortest Way Home," Brad and Nate reunite in a recently-surrendered Germany after Nate is injured. Then, three-four months later, Brad ends up back in England and, eventually, back at Mathilda with Nate. That is covered in the third story, "War Poetry."


End file.
